Although I am not a life coach (unlike my friend Rebecca, who was best man at my wedding) I had the kind of thought a life coach would have on Friday, when the friends list filled up with various and sundry New Year’s resolutions. On the grounds that writing and game design qualify one for everything, I hereby present this advice for your edification.

Given that the exercise of willpower is given over to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is overworked and underpaid, the traditional resolution is a poor mechanism for impulse control. It is better at generating guilty feelings than at breaking habits we want to rid ourselves of.

Instead, use resolutions to promise yourself a few new adventures in the year to come. Depending on your resources and wherewithal, they might be big, like taking up a new sport or language. More likely you want to pick easily achievable micro-adventures.

For example, my resolutions for the year are:

* achieve mastery over fennel, annexing it into the vegetable rotation
* investigate pozole, with an eye to making some

These, you have noted, are modest and easily achieved. (Well, maybe not the pozole; I haven’t looked into it yet.) If carried out, they will result in pleasure. And, since I couched them as resolutions, the agreeable sense of an action item ticked off the to-do list. If not achieved, I will go over to Mexitaco and have their delicious pozole—a more than acceptable alternate outcome.

Needless guilt bad. Giving a gift to yourself, good.

Thus endeth the life lesson. Happy 2010, everybody.

Tags: cognition, holidays, life

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Tags: cheese sandwich, kidding around, life, moths, photos

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Last night my mom called to tell me that a building that played a central role in both of our childhoods had been destroyed. Two people were killed and five very seriously hurt after a fire at the Muskoka Heights Retirement Residence in my hometown of Orillia, Ontario.

From the 1950s to 1970s this was a nursing home owned and run by my grandmother and grandfather in partnership with her sister, a nurse. (My grandfather and his brother married my grandmother and her sister, respectively.) When they established the home, my grandparents moved my mom and two uncles down from a farm near the northern Ontario town of Sundridge.

The business was still a going concern when I was a young kid, so some of my earliest memories are sited in the two-story apartment my grandmother and grandfather had on top of the nursing home.

I saw the TV coverage of Neil Armstrong’s moon landing in that apartment, with my dad keeping me awake so I wouldn’t miss the historical moment. I remember that my grandparents were away for some reason but no longer recall why the TV viewing would have been better at their place. This might have been before cable was widespread in Orillia, so maybe it was a reception thing.

A somewhat later memory is of my putatively straight-laced uncle handing my more counterculturish uncle some record albums he had to get rid of now that his oldest son was nearing the age where he could work the stereo. I remember surreptitiously checking out the covers and filing the name “George Carlin” for future reference.

On rare occasions, I would be left to putter about in the staff areas of the nursing home itself. I felt less at ease there than in the apartment. Mainly I recall my fascination with industrial-sized quantities of food.

By my grandparents’ last years running the home, it became a running joke that new nurses would embarrass themselves by mistaking my grandpa for a patient. Once a staffer made a conspiratorial comment to me about his advancing age, a perception I found deeply shocking.

The place changed hands a bunch of times after they sold it, soon switching from what we’d now call an extended care facility to a simple retirement home. Although it occasionally pops up in my dreams, I haven't given much thought to the place in years. To revisit childhood memories in the context of a disastrous event like this is dislocating, to say the least.

Tags: life, memory, orillia

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This will be my last post before the holidays, so please accept from me the expression of sincere goodwill most associated with your chosen solstice festival.

We’re doing one last day of errand running in the city tomorrow. Can’t forget to pack the Christmas pudding for Orillia! Then Valerie and I will be piling on a bus and heading up from Toronto to Barrie to spend time with her family. It will be a full house this year, with about 20 immediate family members. The midday Christmas dinner will include an even larger complement. At this point I’m already performing a mental list of my salad and side dish repertoire, trying to work out how many dishes I can easily produce in large quantities while working in my mother-in-law’s sparsely equipped kitchen. There are a lot of mouths to feed over a period of several days, and it’s the best contribution I can make to the swirl of friendly, embracing chaos that is yule time with Valerie’s family.

After a turkey dinner on the 25th at noon, we gather up our loot and get chauffeured up to my hometown of Orillia for more gifts and another turkey feast with my much smaller family.

When we get back to the city a day or two later, we’ll be relaxing and catching up on our reading, DVDs, and first run movies. During the fall prestige movie season we always fall behind on the latter, as Valerie is busy working on her annual handmade ornament, which she produces in mass quantities to give out to friends, coworkers, and family. This year ushers in her most awesome ornament ever. I would include a photo but this would be a security breach, as some recipients may be reading this blog.

Which is a long way of saying that I don’t plan on doing much, if any, blogging until the New Year. If I do, it will be all ephemera, one-liners and possibly more installments of What Kind Of Fish. I promise not to say anything intelligent until 2008. Well, not here anyway. I reserve the right to let an astute observation or two slip in front of my family.

Thanks to everyone who’s read or commented here over the past year. Unlike Loretta, I don’t have a wreath of marmot heads to give you, but I am grateful for your serving as the solitary writer’s equivalent of a water cooler crowd. Thanks for all the lovely procrastination, and have a safe and fun holiday!

Tags: barrie, life, meta, orillia

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Went up to Barrie last weekend to attend 60th wedding anniversary celebrations for Valerie’s mom and dad. Their actual anniversary was earlier in the month. By a coincidence of scheduling the party fell on our own 17th anniversary. Valerie’s family is enormous (numerically, not per capita weight) and they managed to fill a smallish church hall for chitchat, triangular sandwich pieces, and cake.

The nieces and cousins-of-nieces who were all rambunctious kids at our wedding are now twenty-somethings. Apparently Barrie is suddenly all about the Facebook. They even have Valerie’s mom signed up for it. She’s an indefatigable collector of family photos and anecdotes for her vast genealogical chronicles, so I guess this facilitator of college hookups has morphed into something that’s right up her alley. Although I need another social networking site like I need to inherit an echidna farm, I may have to check it out, as a source of info on the comings and goings of the relatives. I am told it induces nowhere near the retinal damage of Myspace pages. We shall see, Facebook. We shall see.

Now we have a mild bug. Disease vector: cute baby. Another argument for never leaving the house.

Tags: barrie, life, social networks

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We have ants in the new joint. Ants have suddenly decided to invade Valerie's folks' place. Musician Kristin Hersh, of Throwing Muses fame, has ants.

That’s three examples, so therefore ants are a trend. You either have ants now, or you are about to get ants.

Our ants are of the large, black variety. Much better, I readily admit, than the bitey red fellows.

In my presence, these ants display a consciousness, if not of guilt, then of hazard. Unlike cockroaches, who flee the light, or fruit flies, who zip away at the sign of motion, these guys lurch into an evasive scuttle at my mere approach. They are aware of a relationship between us, and that they are where the shouldn’t be, and that I intend to squish them for it. It is a much more personal antagonism, between me and these bugs, than with the aforementioned insect pests. I doubt that it runs both ways. They wish me no harm. They simply want to crawl around my hardwood floors. No dice, say I. This is my territory. Besides, you get on our bathroom towels, and that’s plain not right.

Or maybe they can smell the formic acid residue on the undersides of my Simple sneakers, marking the spots where their brave fellow soldiers met their ignominious demises.

Now when I’m out walking, when I see an ant, my reflexes jolt my foot into squashing mode. I have to stop myself from following through. “Sorry, dude,” I say. “You and me are cool, sidewalk ant.”

Tags: life

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Gamer, fan, computer programmer and blogger Greg Blake died earlier this week from complications to follow-up surgery from his recent lung transplant. Greg’s passing is first and foremost an occasion to express sympathy for the loss suffered by his family and many friends.

I also find myself thinking of the effect of social networking, in this case the fan convention scene and online communities on one’s sense of acquaintanceship. I vividly remember my handful of encounters with Greg even as the exact context for them has grown fuzzy. (Internal monologue excerpt: I first knew him through Alarums and Excursions, right? And we hung out at, what was it? The San Diego Comicon, the year Shadowfist launched? And then we must have chatted a couple of times at various GenCons, too...)

The growth of geographically dispersed, affinity-based communities creates a new category of interrelationship, which seems more significant than mere acquaintanceship but lacks the history of time spent together we associate with traditional friendship. I imagine somebody’s already put a name to this phenomenon. You can hang with folks at a con and, due to assumed shared interests and worldview, skip the preliminaries and coalesce into an instant posse with the same dynamic as a long-standing group of pals. Or you may get the chance to drop into a pre-existing gang of friends like a special guest star appearing for one episode of their ongoing TV series. Time and energy may prevent you from staying in touch but if you bump into each other at the next event you pick up where you left off. It’s this lingering if latent bond that proves surprisingly potent when death intrudes into our comparatively innocent, fun-based, sub-society.

Often a person’s presence strikes you in a lasting way, even after only a short interaction. I hardly knew the much-loved gaming writer Nigel Findley, but he was the kind of person whose warmth and intelligence made a strong and immediate impression. Due largely to his strongly projected personal presence (and also his sparkling talent as a wordsmith), his untimely death hit me harder than it logically should have. So much so that I felt like kind of a grief poseur, compared to those who were genuinely close to him. Like I hadn't earned the right to feel personally jolted by the news.

In Greg’s case his blog writing gave us an ongoing entry point into his life. He wrote about his health issues in his blog. I marveled at the enormity of his initial operation. He seemed casually upbeat heading into the most recent surgery, rendering the result even more shocking as friends logged in to report on his worsening situation.

To be reminded of the preciousness of life, and even of its sometimes shockingly fleeting nature, is a gift, albeit a bittersweet one. I thank Greg for sharing his life, passions, and thoughts with us.

Tags: in memoriam, life, social networks

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I lost a couple of work days to a minor bug last week. Suffering from severe IQ loss, I found myself sitting in front of the TV, channel surfing by paging through the program listings on my PVR.

“Look,” I thought to myself, “there’s a show called Friends. I wonder what that’s all about.”

Tags: life

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I guess I’m settled in the new place because I now have time to be preoccupied by current events again. For two months there was nothing rattling around the brain but work and moving-related chores. Kind of refreshing to pay attention only to things I could directly affect through my own actions.

My rule for talking about issues on the blog is that I do it only when I have something to say about them that I haven’t seen somebody else write.

I was pleasantly surprised by the sanity of the Moussaoui verdict, but so were many others. Nice to see that even in a symbolically demanding situation the jurors kept to the principle that you put people to death for the acts they commit, not those they wish they’d committed. I can only imagine the look on the face of Shoe Bomber Guy when Moussaoui roped him into his last-minute 9/11 fantasy. I also wonder what would have happened if Moussaoui had warned his captors in advance of 9/11. The man presents as fruit-bat insane. Would anyone have paid any attention to him?

As a dedicated follower of the truthiness movement, I’ve also wasted a sack of time reading responses to the Stephen Colbert appearance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. I enjoyed seeing the complacently deferential press corps squirm in horror as it slowly dawned on them that they'd hired a satirist instead of a mere purveyor of topical humor. As is often the case Jon Stewart had the pithiest observation when he said that there should have been no surprise that Colbert would do exactly the same thing he does on his TV show four nights a week.

Now the Hookergate scandal, with its trifecta of money, sex and the CIA, intends to nibble away at my attention span. How delightful, after the -gate suffix has been pounded into the ground by overuse, to have a story that really warrants it -- by virtue of being partially set at the Watergate Hotel. Sweet nostalgia.

But I’ll get my revenge on this story. I’m incorporating it into my work.

Tags: current events, life, writing life

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Friday was our sixteenth wedding anniversary. We exchanged DVDs (the new Marlene Dietrich collection for the new Carole Lombard collection) and I cooked a shrimp stir fry.

Valerie and I were married in April of 1990, a nice even year number which has the advantage of keeping the math easy.

At this time, Toronto was on edge, due to the activities of the so-called High Park Rapist. Nicknamed after the Toronto neighborhood he preyed in, he broke into the apartments of a number of women and attacked them.

But we didn’t get married in Toronto, we had the ceremony in Valerie’s hometown of Barrie, a small city about an hour’s drive north from here. Her mom handled many of the arrangements, including the selection of wedding photographer. Mostly I didn’t want some fake cheesy guy who’d make me grimace by trying to jolly up his subjects. The selling point with the guy Muriel found was that the proofs would be full 8 ½ by 11” prints. He did mostly product photography but this was not supposed to be a problem.

So the big day came. We got married at Valerie’s folk’s house, with no photographer present, and then the extended family trooped down to the guy’s studio to have the pictures taken. The photog was an unprepossessing guy, not the oleaginous smoothie I’d been dreading. In fact, he seemed a little rattled. Soon it became apparent that he wasn’t really on top of his game. For some reason he was only getting half the number of shots from each roll of large format film as he would normally expect. Instead of taking twice as many rolls he skipped taking duplicate shots of each pose.

Later, when we got the promised large proofs, some of the groupings were bum shots. My grandmother’s eyes were closed in the shot of her together with my grandfather, for example. Would have been nice to have a second version of that.

We had the proofs. Various relatives placed orders for other shots but nothing came. Muriel had a heck of a time tracking the guy down. She heard from him that he was having health problems, hence the delay. She even managed to get a few shots out of him. Finally she got ahold of his father, who reacted to the health issue story thusly: “Oh, so that’s what he told you, was it?”

Turns out our wedding photographer was having a spot of legal trouble. He’d been nabbed for one sexual assault in the Barrie area. He had confessed to it and was awaiting sentencing when the new owner of his old house found a set of hidden photographs. Trophies from the High Park attacks, down in the city.

So we didn’t get an ideal set of wedding shots.

But we did get this anecdote, about how our wedding photographer was a notorious serial rapist.

Tags: life

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The first episode of the new David Mamet TV series on CBS about special forces units, called The Unit, was very cool. Tres Mamety. Think Spartan: the TV Series, though the inevitable subversive element has yet to rear its head.

Michael Winterbottom’s movie non-adaptation of Tristram Shandy with Steve Coogan also rocks.

And that’s the closest to substantive blog content you may get out of me for a while. We’ll be moving at the end of the month. Couple that massively preoccupying task with an extremely tight deadline I have no intention of blowing, and all other uses of my time and mental energy are going to have to go by the wayside until we’re well settled in the new place. I may post the occasional episode of The Birds but that’s about it. I was going to promise to try to keep up with Angels and Operators but realized that I am fooling myself.

( Those of you who know us may be interested in the details of our housing shift. )

Tags: cinema hut, life, television hut

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